Goodnight Moonshine Quartet performs at Word Barn
Eben Pariser and Molly Venter met in 2011 at Folk Alliance. In short order they were engaged and made an album together, 2013’s eponymous Goodnight Moonshine. Venter was a member of folk trio Red Molly and Pariser was in Roosevelt Dime. They married in 2014. Twelve years and three kids later, the band they launched is growing.
Goodnight Moonshine became a quartet last year, almost by accident. While recording their third album, Business Unusual, mix engineer David Seitz suggested they flesh out the sound with a rhythm section.
“He said, ‘This is really great, but … you should put a little bass and a little something in there,’” Pariser recalled in a recent Zoom interview, accompanied by Venter. “So we brought in our two favorite people that we were working with and circling at the time, and came out of that process with a band.”
Upright bassist Adam Chilenski was an easy choice. A friend Pariser has known since he was 8 years old, he’s played on all of their records and recently finished graduate school in jazz. Drummer Ryan Sands, whom Pariser calls “New Haven jazz royalty,” was an unexpected get.
“He told me, ‘I’ve always wanted to play folk music,’ and I just scratched my head,” Pariser said.
Following the sessions, the couple wondered if Sands had even enjoyed himself, and were pleased with his response. “When we got him the CD, he goes, ‘I had the time of my life making that record,’” Venter recalled. A few shows in, Sands was calling them his favorite band to play with.
“I think the jazz world expects one certain thing,” she said. “Goodnight Moonshine has a lot of lanes, a lot of possibilities.”
The record itself was born during pandemic-induced isolation. With twins on the way and the world shutting down, the couple stopped touring and stepped away from other projects, turning a spare bedroom into a studio.
“We were trapped,” Venter said. “Once we had the twins, all we had was each other.”
For Pariser the silence was revelatory. He’d long played electric guitar, but the stillness let him hear an acoustic as if for the first time. “I’d play a note and listen to it and feel like I needed to call everyone: ‘Molly, come over. Have you heard this?’ It changed me forever.”
They wanted Business Unusual to bottle what happens on stage on a good night, and so recorded it mostly live.
“We tried to capture magic, and I think we did on a lot of them,” Venter said. Her songs arrived in an equally unguarded way. She’d escape into a room with her guitar and let “gibberish” come out until phrases surfaced, then whole lines.
“After a while, it was like, ‘Oh, that’s what this is about,’” she said, her snippet-gathering akin to “weaving together the conversation from yesterday and the film I saw last year and the trip I took 20 years ago.” On the standout song “Mystical Creatures” and others, she’d hand Pariser a bare melody for him to musically adorn.
At an upcoming Word Barn show the quartet will play a rundown of the album, which Venter describes as narrative songs with “a lot of meat in the lyrics,” bookended by joyful ones. A few darker, what she termed “truthy,” numbers occupy the middle space.
Working together wasn’t easy, but it’s improving.
“We used to joke we’re a two out of 10 on teamwork,” Pariser said. These days, audiences see them onstage exchanging gentle jibes but clearly enjoying each other. Both believe the takeaway message in their music is it’s not too late to heal — for everyone. “Perhaps we can get along.”
Goodnight Moonshine performs infrequently, so they try to make every time they play feel special.
“There’s going to be some song in there that is magical,” Pariser said, adding, “As long as we stay present for the whole show, it’s an incredible experience.” Venter offered a simpler thought.
“If you shut up and get with the beat,” she said, “you’ll find that we are all seamlessly interconnected.”
Goodnight Moonshine Quartet w/ Riverado
When: Friday, Nov. 13, 7 p.m.
Where: The Word Barn, 66 Newfields Road, Exeter
Tickets: $25, thewordbar
